... ): 365 –85. Arnold , Matthew . “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” 1864. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings . Ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993 . 26 –51. Badiou , Alain . 1998. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil . Trans. Peter Hallward...

...Samuel Cross This essay closely examines Henry James's notion of “tact”—caution in what one says about others—treating the idea from an ethical perspective. I trace James's ethics of tact through his late The Wings of the Dove , arguing that the author holds himself to certain stringent standards...

...Peter D. McDonald When J. Hilllis Miller first coined the phrase “the ethics of reading” in the mid-1980s, it constituted a decisive intervention in the overheated debates about the merits of deconstruction, inaugurating the so-called ethical turn within Anglo-American literary studies. Yet it also...

...Christine Mahady This essay examines the ways in which depictions of animal and human corporeality in Jack London's fiction support an ethics concerned with cultivating a greater attunement to one's surroundings, including other bodies. In contrast to previous readings that understand London's...

...Jason Solinger Norton Brian Michael , Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of Enlightenment ( Lanham : Bucknell UP , 2012 ) , pp. 168, cloth , $65.00 . Copyright © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 More than half a century after Ian Watt's...

...Christopher Weinberger Much recent ethical criticism theorizes novels as becoming ethically effective through readers’ oscillation between immersion in mimetic worlds and subsequent reflection on that experience. Murakami Haruki, however, presents readers with irreducibly fictional realities...

... and the Foe ur-text to argue that the novel proposes an impossible crossing, whereby key strategies we have used to value the genre—its capacity to summon countervoices or to invoke an ethical response to alterity—are shadowed by a radical question about the limits of our readerly attention. Copyright ©...

...Clemens Spahr Banita Georgiana , Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 . ( Lincoln : U of Nebraska P , 2012 ), pp. 376 , cloth, $60.00 . © 2013 by Novel, Inc. 2013 Duke University Press Works Cited Cohen Samuel . After the End...

... : Penguin , 2005 . J. M. Coetzee: Ethics, Politics, and Writing MIKE MARAIS, Secretary of the Invisible: The Idea of Hospitality in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 249, cloth, $72.00. PATRICK HAYES, J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics...

... Literature in a Global Age , with the simple statement that “this is a short book, meant to be almost a kind of primer” (xii). Its brief is to argue that reading contemporary literature can create an ethical relation between self and other. The book explores the specific challenges brought on by the global...

... of the novel's ethics have been predicated upon its capacity to circulate otherness. Departing from these models, the essay revisits Erich Auerbach's claim that the contemporary novel would bear reference to “a common life.” And it considers alternative accounts of the ethics of culture in Lukács's...

...Katarina O'Briain Abstract This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct...

...Penny Fielding This essay address the problem of action in William Godwin's writing, comparing his characterization of the ethical decision in An Enquiry concerning Political Justice with his much more uneasy rendering of it in Caleb Williams . The novel, coming between the two editions...

... central statements of this philosophy are The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938), the latter of which I suggest is not merely an antiwar pamphlet (according to critical convention) but also an anti-programmatic ethical treatise for living what Michel Foucault calls “the non-fascist life.” Criticism...

... the prototypical marriage plot but also to undermine one of the novel's principal ethical aims: to develop a capacity for sympathy among characters and readers. Compared with some other emotions, envy has received relatively little literary-critical attention, but its formative place in the psychoanalytic theory...

... and Incredibly Close (set in New York City after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001), it examines the dictate that fiction about historical violence must perforce be true to the facts. This dictate aligns fidelity with ethics and sets as its stakes the dismaying implications of blurring the distinction...

...Aarthi Vadde This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how...

... the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized...

... of the 1980s), and uses close readings of moments in Indiana , Mauprat , and Lélia to reflect on the renewed urgency—in the wake of #MeToo—of the sort of ethical questions raised by such feminism during the “sex wars.” If Sand is not, ultimately, an antisex feminist, her novels are nevertheless thought...

... life, with its affinity for protracted descriptive pauses, more distorting still. Natural history influenced these descriptive practices; this essay argues that nineteenth-century novelistic description borrowed both a structure and an ethical justification from the observational practices of natural...